Smog hangs over a construction site in Weifang city, Shandong province, Oct 16. 2015. Air quality went down in many parts of China since Oct 15 and most cities are shrounded by haze. [Photo/IC] Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Trump’s America cancelling billions of dollars of UN climate payments apparently opens the way for totalitarian China to assume the moral high ground in global environmental diplomacy.

Trump Win Clears Way For China to Lead on Climate

The election of climate change skeptic Donald Trump as president is likely to end the U.S. leadership role in the international fight against global warming and may lead to the emergence of a new and unlikely champion: China.

China worked closely with the administration of outgoing President Barack Obama to build momentum ahead of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The partnership of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters helped get nearly 200…

I’m only a few chapters into it, so far, but it seems to be another proof of something I’ve long believed: that Human history produces far more horror than any story by King or Lovecraft. The Cultural Revolution, like so many other Leftist attempts to remake humanity –the French Revolution during “the Terror,” Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (2), the USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea– shows how dangerous it is to let one person, one group, or government in general to have too much power.

PS: Why, yes. This is a shameless bit of shilling on my part. I like getting the occasional gift certificate that comes from people buying stuff via my link. But I still think it’s a good book.

Footnote:
(1) I’m happy to say I’ve found no typos or formatting errors, so far. These are all too common in Kindle e-books.
(2) Yes, Fascism and Nazism, two variations on statism, are products of the Left.

It’s hard to find a better description of one of the key characteristics of the Left –from mild progressive to hard-core communist– than this:

In other words, the Left believes it has figured out History, is certain that it flows in just one direction and where it ends, and that they themselves are the ones best able to facilitate this. Whether you want it or not.

We’ve all heard of the “credit score,” right? That number that tells lenders whether you’re a responsible borrower, or if you’re some sort of deadbeat? Your borrowing, repayment, and income history are all factored in to arrive at a number that serves as a shorthand for your credit-worthiness.

Now, imagine taking all your Internet activity and all the doings of you and your friends and using that to come up with a “score” showing how good a citizen you are.

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ” In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.

The system will be run by China’s ostensibly private (1) Internet companies. Read on to see how Yahoo –an American company– is a part owner in this tool of oppression. Ironic, right? The Internet, which is supposed to intellectually liberate Man by providing him with near limitless information, is instead being twisted by an evil regime and its American(!) collaborator into a means of thought control.

This should rightly horrify Westerners, Americans most of all (2), and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a government founded on the principle of human liberty to not only criticize such a system and those who enable it, but to forbid companies that do business in the US from any participation.

But that would require an American government that believed in American values, something we’re currently lacking.

I suppose we should be grateful progressives can’t ever implement something similar here.

We hope.

Footnotes:
(1) Only officially a Communist state, now. Though the Communist Party maintains a monopoly on political and coercive power, the system has evolved more toward a fascist, state-capitalist model.
(2) Except for certain New York Times columnists who really, really wish we were more like China.

For Prager University, expatriate Egyptian Christian Raymond Ibrahim (author of the essential Al-Qaeda Reader) explains why Islamism –radical Islam, is the heir to fascism and communism as the most dangerous ideology facing the world today:

My quibble here is over the term “Islamism.” This implies that the activities of jihadists, those waging war in Islam’s name against us in order to create a new caliphate and impose totalitarian Sharia law, are somehow “not quite Islam.”

Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.

In other words, “Islam is Islam. Period.” No need for special terms. Islam itself is radical, with its imperative to wage war on the non-Muslim world and impose total control over its adherents via a form of totalitarianism antithetical to everything we stand for:

Islam, in its classical interpretation, is a comprehensive sociopolitical system with its own legal code. Yes, it has some strictly theological tenets (e.g., the oneness of Allah, the conceit that Mohammed is the final prophet). These, however, comprise but a small percentage of Islamic belief, which covers the full extent of political, economic, and social life — from warfare to hygiene, in exacting rules resistant to change. That is why in virtually every Islamic society — i.e., wherever sharia is incorporated into law — the separation of spiritual and political life is rejected; it is why we find misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, ruthless discrimination against religious minorities, hostility to freedom, suspicion of reason, and backwardness in economics and education.

And millions upon millions of devout Muslims around the world believe this is the way things should be, and a significant portion of those are willing to act on it and fight to impose it on the rest of us, having become radicalized in service to a radical ideology.

The most dangerous one in the world, today.

PS: And yet I’m sympathetic to the wish for a term to separate truly peaceful Muslims who have no desire to impose Sharia on the rest of us from the maniacs who see our corpses as their steppingstones to Paradise. Perhaps “Islamism” is the best compromise, describing the movement of those willing to act on Islam’s aggressive urges. Regardless, we need to be honest about Islam, the religion and the ideology.

And that Kim Jong Un and the entire leadership of the world’s largest prison camp masquerading as a nation need to be hanged from lampposts:

GOSSIP COST ME MY WHOLE FAMILYWhen Kim Young Soon was reported for ‘gossiping’ about then North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, three generations of her family were thrown into a brutal labour camp.

Her elderly parents and four young children all died after being imprisoned with her under a system of ‘guilt by association’.

She survived after being held at Yodok for nine years over the accusation that she gossiped about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong-il, the father of current leader Kim Jong-un.

Young Soon told Amnesty International: ‘The guilt by association system applies to the family members – my mother and father, who were over 70 years old, my nine-year-old daughter and my three sons, who were seven, four and one.

‘When my parents starved to death, I didn’t have coffins for them. I wrapped their bodies with straw, carried them on my back and went to bury them myself. And the children… I lost all my family.’ Describing conditions at Yodok, she said: ‘It is a place that would make your hair stand on end.’

That’s the sidebar to an article describing how North Korea is enlarging its gulag to accommodate women being forcibly returned from China. Go and read it, especially you Social Justice Warriors who think being forced to pay for your own college education is some sort of crime against humanity. You’re desperately in need of some perspective.

Someday, that regime is going to collapse, and the resulting chaos will range somewhere between a severe headache and a nightmare for the nations around it. But its end will still represent a net improvement for the world.

A NORTH Korean scientist who defected to Finland has promised to expose the regime’s shocking practice of testing chemical weapons in its own citizens.

The biochemical weapons scientist, 47, managed to flee a North Korean research centre on the Chinese border on June 6 via the Philippines, a source from a North Korean human rights group told Yonhap news agency.

He reportedly took with him a storage device loaded with 15 gigabytes of information on the use of humans to test biological and chemical weapons in the North Korean laboratory he worked in. The data would shed light on the regime’s “inhumane tests”, the source told Yonhap.

“His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt sceptical about his research,” the source said.

The defector, known only by his surname Lee, is now expected to give testimony before the European Union parliament later this month.

“Sceptical” is an odd word, don’t you think? “Horrified,” “nauseated,” “outraged,” maybe. But “sceptical” implies thinking “Hmmm… I may be wrong, but, perhaps this isn’t a good idea.”

Then again, in North Korea, even skepticism (US spelling) is treason and can get you shot, so let us not doubt “Mr. Lee’s” bravery for being even “sceptical.”

Meanwhile, here’s just one example of what these human demons do:

Kwon Hyuk, a former head of security at North Korea’s infamous Camp 22, has described gas chambers where chemical experiments were conducted on prisoners.

Appearing on the BBC2 program This World in 2004, Hyuk said healthy prisoners were held inside glass chambers that were filled with gas while technicians observed their agonising deaths.

“I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,” he said in the documentary.

“The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but (until) the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.

“At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault, that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.”

As I’ve said before, defector reports can be unreliable; there is a risk they will say what they think their benefactors want to hear in order to get good treatment. But, there are so many reports and they are all so similar that it is hard to discount them. “Mr. Lee” is the first I’ve heard of who claims to have brought with him hard data, not just stories. His testimony should be very interesting.

Let’s hope it hastens the end of the world’s largest prison camp masquerading as a nation, and that it leads to a condign punishment for its jailers.